Underestimated Hero
by Milli Moi
Summary: Sickle Cell Disease, type one diabetes and a history of thin blood which just doesn't clot. Rose does not appear the perfect hero, but is a hero born, or made?
1. Chapter 1

Prologue 

"Natasha, where can I go? Where in the world am I not a threat?"

"You're not a threat to me."

"You sure? Even if I didn't just- there isn't a future with me, I can't ever, I can't have this, kids, do the math, I physically can't."

"Neither can I."

One 

They beep, the sounds all around me, there are lights up there, lights above my head which have slowly muddied from the classic oblong of fluorescent bar lighting into a rough oval of white after every few ceiling tiles. The tiles themselves are melting into simple patches of grey. The world as I can see it is simply swirls of grey and white. The lights seem to go fuzzy, the screen of my eyes pixelates turning into a tv set with no signal.

Sound is going too. I wonder if I'm wearing my headphones, it sounds like I am; I know I'm not. There are faces in front of my eyes every now and again, looking down at me, shining lights in my face, I try to turn but even the littlest of movements feels like I'm lifting a ten-tonne building. There is a muffled sound, the way music hears if my headphones are only half plugged into my iphone. I'm sure it's Faye but I can't see her, I can't see anything.

I feel weak, so weak. I'm awake, and although I don't remember much I have a feeling that time has passed. It's dark, but there are still lights around me. After a few moments of coherent thought I realise those lights are coming from surrounding machinery. I try to look around but even moving my neck makes me tired and I am filled with the same issues as before. It is so hard, I'm so heavy. Squinting my eyes I am able to see that the room is a single room. Most of my hospital visits mean I'm on my own. My immune system is too bad to risk being on a group ward, I need isolation and the barrier of the double doors to keep me safe.

There's a tv on the wall in the left hand corner of the room. To the right lies a window with the signature cheap plastic hospital blinds shutting out the light. There will be a door to the bathroom somewhere but I can't look. It's too hard, I'm too heavy.

I can see out through the door to my left without having to turn my head. I can see two figures behind the pain of glass between the door and the tv. The observation area.

I know they are women but they couldn't look more different from each other. They are in shadow and using my peripheral vision the figures become even harder to identify. The first one is short and rounder. A larger lady who verges on the edge of clothing you can by in average clothing stores. She has bobbed brown hair and wears glasses with a brown frame. This is Faye. Faye is the kind of Mumsie looking mum that you expect to see with a teenage kid. She is also the kind of person no one would doubt was my foster mum. Faye wasn't her real name, and Anna Kowalski - the name I had been admitted under – wasn't mine. It was all to keep me safe. I was a high priority case apparently. My parents, Faye and Sam were bound by their job to give their own lives if it meant my survival. I was an asset, a pawn in the life of my mother. Yet seeing the shadow beside Faye, the taller and very slender woman with arm muscles which made it hard for her to fit a leather jacket made for the average woman, my heart still began to thump in my chest a little.

Mom was here.

Already my eyes were determining it was time up, time to sleep, time to sub come to whichever illness had put me into hospital this time. I battled them, but – unlike my мамуля - I was no fighter.

"what's the story Faye, is she alright? Is it the sickle cell?"

Мамуля was worried, she had fear in her voice. Not yet I begged my eyes, feeling my body sink lower in the mattress as though it was swimming and only my head remained above water. Мамуля was here, мамуля would guard over me, even if it meant the Earth.


	2. Chapter 2

When I next woke, it was light once more. The monitors beeped less and apart from the fatigue from sleeping in hospital, and some very bruised hands and fingers, I felt a lot better. My sanity had been restored. This morning, however, only one face stood at the glass window. The face of Faye. She smiled at me briefly before finishing rubbing the alcoholic hand wash into her hands, and waved as she headed away out the second door and into the main ward.

I glanced around for the clock once more, this time the extensive effort was no longer needed and I could look at the face of the clock with clarity I hadn't had the night before. It was half past eleven, and, by the light outside, I knew it must be eleven thirty am.

Faye would be heading off to check the house was in one piece, that Reuben hadn't burned it to the ground. She always made those jokes in public, the sort that irritated me down to the core. She made them to cover it all, to make me safe and secure from the ten billion or so people who either wanted me dead or wanted me to be a lab monkey. I hated hiding. I was – I am – proud of who I am.

I sometimes wished I could forget, forget that my name wasn't Anna, that I wasn't from Ukraine or wherever my medical records said. I was more, so much more, than the jocks at school could have ever imagined. I never knew whether to agree or laugh when they called my Mom hot.

I knew I could never forget who I was, the medical mystery - more like medical nightmare. I was diagnosed with Sickle Cell anaemia at two years old, type one diabetes at seventy-three (corrected to fifteen) All the crap that came with these two conditions, and how they reacted to each other, was why I couldn't even hear my Mom's voice in my head when I read her letters. I barely knew her, and the things that I did know was mostly stuff that everyone knew.

Sitting up, I reached clumsily for the chart on the end of my bed. My right arm had a large cannula stabbed into it, a bag of 1.0 glucose per litre attached to the end of the plastic tubing. It made my arm heavy and awkward but still I grabbed onto the chart.

I could remember the whole thing had started with a crisis- when my sickle cell flares up, and then I'd started to feel sick with the pain. I had been sweating cold but my whole body had felt warm, so, so warm as if the heat was trying to fight its way out through my skin. I didn't remember much, just flashes of doctors and nurses. That guy with the eye patch was there, on the phone in the corner- until the doctor insisted he talk outside instead.

According to the chart I had exhibited a high temperature of 105 degrees Fahrenheit, A very low blood sugar level of 1.9 and my bloods were very low in red blood cells. They didn't know what had caused the collapse- story of my life- but that I was going to be ok. Again, story of my life.

As I allowed myself to flop softly back onto the hospital pillows – which even had the name St John's printed on the pillow cases – and curled back into a heap.

Sometimes I begged to have someone else, someone who was like me and had awesome parents. Most kids wouldn't think of my Mom that way but she was that way. She did it all for me and for the planet, they were two sides of the same coin. And I had to believe that, or none of this, none of the lies, and hiding, and pretending - and that attempt on our lives when I was younger – none of it would be worth a thing.


	3. Chapter 3

Part three 

_I never came across as that sort, the sort to have a double life? Yes, I was definitely that but the sort to have a hidden kid? No, they never saw that coming. I had never told the truth about Rose, not all of it. Fury knew about the kid, knew where to place her and was sworn within an inch of his life to protect Rose or risk the destruction of S.H.I.E.L.D. and possibly the entire US._

 _Bruce, sure he was sweet, he was different from most guys. Most guys either wanted to kill me or sleep with me, and neither was going to happen. I had learned a long time ago, sex is not for pleasure, it's for answers. He couldn't have known about Rose. Clint, Clint had his own three. He was my closest friend and the reason that both Rose and I were alive at all but even he could never know. I wouldn't risk his life, and I owed him more than I could ever repay. Tony, well that was self-explanatory as was Thor. Cap, sure he was a good guy but he was too good, too righteous to know. Fury, he only knew because it was convenient. I never expected him to become more than just a boss, I trusted him with Rose as much as he trusted me with open access to S.H.I.E.L.D._

 _I walked away from the hospital in the dark with people stopping and staring or nudging each other and pretending they hadn't been looking when I answered them with a death glare. I had stuffed my hands in my pockets, hood up, trying to look normal. No one would connect me with Rose, no one would think I was someone's Mother. That was the way it had to be._

 _Rose was safe, even if my heart would never be again._

 _She was the reason I got a hysterectomy. No more risks, no chances of my heart being torn up like tissue paper once again. I had been so young, only sixteen. It had been 1944, nearing the end of the war and the beginning of the war I would be in for the rest of my life. The war of heart and head._

 _No one tells you that when you have a kid, whether you are maternal or not, that you are bound by every part of your being to that tiny thing. Before she was born I had plans, I was just gonna let her go, let her slip quietly into death. And death cheated me, she was almost dead when she entered the world. In the few seconds it took her to pink up and start screaming I swore I'd died with her._

 _When we found out she had Sickle Cell – of course, just our luck the one thing she inherits from the original Romanovs is a condition linked to Haemophilia – there was no doubt. She couldn't be with me, she was too special. Neither of us needed the pain, the heartbreak and the tears. I couldn't let her die and she couldn't get too close in case I died on her._

 _Yeah, maybe I was this superhero figure, this amazing and invincible person but I didn't feel that way. Rose was strong, she fought her own body on a daily basis. She fought her desires to run away and fought the need to be with me. She knew her presence on a battlefield would put the entire world at risk due to the connection in our hearts. And due to all of this, all these things that made her unique, she was the unlikely hero of it all._

(A/N) hi everyone this is ultra short but I hope people enjoy it, if you have any questions or comments please post them or PM me and I'll be happy to explain, thanks.


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